Remember back during the special session, when we wrote that Nevada Democrats shouldn’t have rubber-stamped Gov. Jim Gibbons’s simpleminded approach to the state budget (i.e. cut the hell out of it)? Remember when we said that everybody in Carson City (except perhaps the governor) knows what needs to be done to set Nevada aright? Remember when we said … well, let’s just reprint what we said, back on the night of June 27:
Throughout the state, Gibbons is derided as a punchline to a joke, a man too stupid to lead, beset by scandal of his own foolish making. But that same governor managed to call the Legislature to Carson City and get precisely the thing he wanted: budget cuts. And nobody stood up to say no.
Who’s laughing last at that joke?
Apparently, the governor is. According to Molly Ball’s Political Notebook in today’s Review-Journal, the governor isn’t too worried about the new website launched by Nevada Democrats last week that derides him in the title: www.americasworstgovernor.com.
Why not? Here’s why, in a quote from gubernatorial spokesman Ben Kieckhefer:
“If they [Democrats] think so poorly of him, why are they following him in lockstep when it comes to solving the worst budget crisis in the history of the state?” he said. “They’ve offered zero solutions. If he’s the worst, what does that make them?”
Bingo! Kieckhefer is precisely right: Democrats love to bash the governor, they love to talk about standing up to the governor, they often threaten that they will “never again” cut the state budget the way the governor wants them to, but at the end of the day … they did precisely what the governor wanted them to do.
So what does that make them? Feckless enablers of a bankrupt policy, we’d say.
Now, standing up to a governor in Nevada is difficult, especially when you have a state Senate controlled (barely) by Republicans, some of whom are rhetorically very skilled (we’re looking at you, state Sen. Bob Beers, you handsome devil!). The requirement (authored by then-Congressman Gibbons) to get two-thirds to raise taxes is difficult to achieve, as history has shown. The goes-down-easy anti-tax rhetoric of the Republicans is hard to uproot from the minds of people who are worried about other things. Low-voter turnout means elections can be turned with 1,000 votes or so, so taking political risks could lead to the end of a career.
But somebody should at least try. Somebody should at least suggest another path, rather than joining in to cut to ribbons our universities, our road-building budgets, our K-12 schools and our social safety net.
Maybe if somebody did that, they’d earn the right to note that Jim Gibbons is, in fact, America’s worst governor.
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